Do Unto Others, or The Golden Rule in Customer Service

There is one major problem with customer service setups today -each channel is treated differently, yet we expect customers to have seamless, similar experiences across all of them. The flaw in this reasoning, it is nearly impossible with normal resources to manage any one channel properly – less along two, three, four or more. You want to replicate, centralize, and leverage as much as you can to bring into action the economies of scale.

A client of mine who undertook the painful and lengthy process of mimicking in all channels what they were doing in their most successful one (telephone) was able to increase customer satisfaction by almost 30 points in a standard business cycle (one calendar quarter in their case) for most of their channels. Even telephone, which had not changed, received higher scores.

Similarly, another client decided not to undertake the “huge burden” (their words) of centralizing channels or even replicatiing workflows and rules. As a result, they ended up spending almost 20%+ year after year for supporting separate channels. This caused them to rethink their strategy of suppoorting separate channels and actually drop some of the channels they were supporting. Yes, this is the opposite of what you want to do if you want to increase customer satisfaction.